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The AI Boom Brings Opportunities to the Oil and Gas Industry The History of Artificial Intelligence
adjusting billions of parameters through repeated computations that require immense processing power. [9] The solution to this energy demand has been the expansion of AI data centers. An AI data center is a facility that houses the specific IT infrastructure needed to train, deploy, and deliver AI applications and services. [10] AI data centers have advanced network and storage architectures and energy and cooling capabilities to handle AI workloads. [11] While the concept of AI data centers is not new, the proliferation of AI data centers has created a unique opportunity for the oil and gas industry.
While it feels like a relatively new development, the concept of artificial intelligence (“AI”) dates back decades. In 1950, computer scientist, Alan Turig, who is considered the “father of AI,” published his seminal work, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” [1] In this paper, Turig considered the question, “can machines think,” claiming that there is no convincing argument that machines cannot think intelligently like humans. [2] In 1956, John McCarthy, a professor at Dartmouth, organized a summer workshop to clarify and develop ideas about thinking machines. [3] It was during this workshop that McCarthy coined the term “artificial intelligence.” [4] Over the past eight decades, AI development has made great strides. In the 1960s, George Devol, an American inventor, created the first industrial robot, Unimate . [5] Unimate was used by General Motors, transporting die castings from an assembly line and welding these parts on auto bodies. [6] In the mid-1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist and professor at MIT, developed the ELIZA program, an early natural language processing program designed to mimic human-like conversation using pattern matching and substitution rules to generate responses. [7] ELIZA was the foundation on which ChatGPT was built. ELIZA was limited in that it lacked human understanding and relied on pre-programmed responses. However, in the 1980s, Rollo Carpenter, an AI developer, created Jabberwacky , which was designed to learn from human input and could simulate natural human conversation. [8]
Natural Gas and AI Data Centers
Natural gas is one of the most reliable sources of energy today, and the infrastructure necessary to produce and transport natural gas to power AI data centers is already in place. The federal government also provides tax incentives to producers of natural gas. Even so, there is still an obstacle that the natural gas industry faces to become the main source of power for AI data centers. To power AI data centers, natural gas needs to be converted to electricity by turbines, which are currently in short supply and very difficult to acquire. The Process by Which Natural Gas Becomes Electricity In general, natural gas is drilled, collected, and transported by pipelines to a treatment plant to remove water or waste and then sent to a power plant. [12]
Today, with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude available, AI is more advanced than it has ever been. AI model training currently involves
At the power plant, the conversion process can take place by several different means including
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